PROLOGUE TO NIKAEA
David Annandale
It is a time of legend.
The galaxy is in flames. The Emperor’s glorious vision for humanity is in ruins. His favoured son, Horus, has turned from his father’s light and embraced Chaos.
His armies, the mighty and redoubtable Space Marines, are locked in a brutal civil war. Once, these ultimate warriors fought side by side as brothers, protecting the galaxy and bringing mankind back into the Emperor’s light. Now they are divided.
Some remain loyal to the Emperor, whilst others have sided with the Warmaster. Pre-eminent amongst them, the leaders of their thousands-strong Legions are the primarchs. Magnificent, superhuman beings, they are the crowning achievement of the Emperor’s genetic science. Thrust into battle against one another, victory is uncertain for either side.
Worlds are burning. At Isstvan V, Horus dealt a vicious blow and three loyal Legions were all but destroyed. War was begun, a conflict that will engulf all mankind in fire. Treachery and betrayal have usurped honour and nobility. Assassins lurk in every shadow. Armies are gathering. All must choose a side or die.
Horus musters his armada, Terra itself the object of his wrath. Seated upon the Golden Throne, the Emperor waits for his wayward son to return. But his true enemy is Chaos, a primordial force that seeks to enslave mankind to its capricious whims.
The screams of the innocent, the pleas of the righteous resound to the cruel laughter of Dark Gods. Suffering and damnation await all should the Emperor fail and the war be lost.
The age of knowledge and enlightenment has ended. The Age of Darkness has begun.
The swirl of unreality pulled at him, its unlimited, terrifying promise seeking to pry his grip free from the materium. Malcador held fast, retaining a peripheral awareness of himself and his surroundings. He knew who he was. He had a sense of his body, though from a distance, as if his consciousness existed just to the side of that pale, angular, robed and hooded thing. He had, at the very edges of his perception, a sense of the chamber he was in, of its eight rune-covered walls. The warp wanted him to let go of all of that. He saw the dangers, but he did not look away. The task was too important, the questions too great, and the possibilities too immense for him to do otherwise.
The Vortex Chamber was deep in the roots of the Imperial Palace’s Corona Spire. It was not the first space Malcador had constructed for his explorations of the immaterium. There had been an earlier one in the peak of the spire, but even with all the windows bricked up, Malcador had been too conscious of the exterior world. The air and sky and openness of the materium had been too close, the mere thickness of a wall away. They had been a distraction from the absolute discipline he needed to fathom and resist the warp. Deep underground, things were different. Rock enclosed the chamber, the chamber enclosed his body, his body enclosed his mind, and in this fully material prison, all the shackles on meditation fell away.
The chamber was an octagon. The shape, he had found, opened up the vistas of the warp more readily. The hexagrammic engravings on the wall were a work in progress. Malcador had already learned many that facilitated his psychic journey, and others that bolstered his strength to return from it. But he was still scratching the surface of possible configurations.
Malcador sat on a throne of basalt, threaded with gold and iron and brass. The inlay was also a developing project, gradually shaping the throne into the best tool for the task. The stone seat itself, though, was ancient. It was a relic from the deepest antiquity of the Age of Terra, a gift from the Emperor to aid Malcador in his work. When he placed himself within the hard embrace of the throne, Malcador felt the currents of the warp thrum through the being of the seat. Though it was carved from a massive block of the materium, in its nature it strained towards the threshold between the dimensions.
There were no other furnishings in the chamber. The throne sat on a dais close to the north wall. A confusion of runes twisted across the floor of the Vortex Chamber, but they were invisible to Malcador in the depths of his contemplation. Instead, he saw only the warp. It appeared to him as a churning tunnel, an endless drop into the realm of madness and potential. Whether the floor truly vanished, or whether his journeys were entirely psychic, Malcador was not sure. The Vortex Chamber’s existence became liminal when he was at work, belonging neither to the materium nor the immaterium, but beholden to both.
Malcador’s consciousness moved through the upheavals of the warp, searching and testing and wondering. The possibilities enticed him, and the storms made him wary. Everything he had experienced and learned since he had begun his study of the immaterium reinforced his contradictory impulses. There was so much power here, power that could be harnessed for the benefit of mankind and for the Emperor’s dream of the Imperium. There was danger, too, as he had always known. The question he wrestled with was whether the possibilities outweighed the risks. He still had no answer. The deeper he went, the more he brushed against immensities, and the further a definitive judgement seemed to race from his grasp.
His mind flew through the clashing waves of unreality. The raging currents made him soar with exhilaration, while the shadows that stopped just short of taking on definite shape threatened with dark portent. Like a ship plunging through the atmosphere of a gas giant, he streaked through contortions of dreams.
Though the concept of space was meaningless, there were correlations between nodules in the warp and specific points in the materium. When he pressed his mind close to these intersections of reality and Chaos, it seemed to him that if he pushed just a little harder, he would pierce through the veil once more and his consciousness would emerge from the empyrean in a different part of the galaxy.
He never pushed. He did not want to discover what would happen if he split his mind and body so definitively in the materium. He had to learn whether the powers of the warp could be harnessed, and he had to know the limits of what could be risked. Some limits were clearly not to be crossed.
Something called to him. At first it was distant, undefined, but his mind reacted to the disturbance as something important, that needed to be known. He turned towards it. Soon thunder, unheard but felt, resonated throughout his being. A storm formed before him, one dense with the fusion of nonexistent colours. It crackled with possibility. Creation and destruction warred, and the storm grew larger. It stared at him, a whirling eye. It raged at him, a gaping maw. There was something important here, something huge and building up. Though he could not read its nature, he knew he must not ignore it.
Malcador let the outer streams of the tempest draw him in closer. As he approached, the intensity of the vortex pained him. He could barely contemplate it. The currents hurled in a violent orbit. Meaning edged near him, but at the last moment he sensed the jaws opening to devour him and he pulled back.
Do not ask what this is, he told himself, the effort of forming a coherent thought drawing him away from the ravenous centre of the storm. Seek where it is.
That he could do with less risk. He could look for the touch of the materium, the link that connected the convulsion in the warp to its correlative in the real.
He closed in again, skirting the edges of the cyclone of dreams. He did not face it directly. He tried to sense beyond it. He looked closer and farther. The tempest was gigantic. It roared with the potential of unrivalled cataclysm. Dense with secrets on the verge of being unveiled, it reached for him, invited him. It wanted him to be part of the dance. There were wonders here. He should see them. He should know them. He should be of them. Because soon everything would be swept up into revelation.